Friday, October 17, 2008

Headlines - Friday

Check out Obama's hilarious speech at the Alfred E. Smith dinner - a couple of excerpts:

"It's an honor to be here with Al Smith. I obviously never knew your great grandfather, but from everything Sen. McCain has told me...the two of them had a great time together before prohibition. Wonderful stories."

"Now, recently one of John's top advisers told The Daily News that if we keep talking about the economy, McCain's gonna lose. So tonight I'd like to talk about the economy."

"While the collapse of the housing market's been tough on every single homeowner, I think we all need to recognize this crisis has been eight times harder on John McCain."

"Many of you know I got my name, Barack, from my father. What you may not know is Barack is actually Swahali for 'That One.' And I got my middle name from somebody who obviously didn't think I'd ever run for President."

"But I know Senator McCain agrees that some of the rumors are getting a bit crazy. I mean, Rupert the other, Fox News actually accused me of fathering two African-American children in wedlock."

"Let me just say categorically I'm proud of the people that come to our rallies... I'm not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation and they're great citizens."

Seriously, what kind of people would say those things with a camera shoved in their face?

The Republican "base" just can't decide if Barack Obama is a fancy educated Harvard elitist or a scary foreign Hawaiian Muslim from the Jungle or just a common fried chicken & watermelon colored, on welfare. If only they could somehow find out "the truth" about this terrorist who will soon be their American president. Oh wait......

The latest edition of Chaffey Community Republican Women contained this:

Overconsumption of meat imposes huge costs on both the environment and on public health. And that's to say nothing of the indefensible cruelty that characterizes CAFO operations. Yet we spend billions to subsidize ever cheaper meat. And billions more to treat the ill health that results from our meat-heavy diets. And we will pay billions, even trillions, more, to handle the environmental damage that eventually results from these policies. It's an incredibly odd state of affairs, like paying someone to touch up your house with lead paint. But we continue doing it because people like meat and because the various industries arrayed around meat -- from acutal producers of livestock to the pharmaceutical companies that create the antibiotics to the corn industry which supplies the grain -- wield enormous political power.

In the swing state of Colorado, we found that the Republican Secretary of State wiped out 19.4% - one in five - voter names in an unnoticed mass purge.

In swing-state New Mexico, in the February caucus, one in nine Democrats found their names missing from the voter rolls. The name of the elections supervisor of San Miguel County was missing from the rolls. The names of the poor and the dark were disappeared.

In Indiana, you heard about 10 nuns who lost their vote because their ID - drivers' licenses - had expired (they were all over eighty). But what about the others? We've calculated that 143,000 others were turned away - disproportionately Blacks and new voters.

The poor Democrats have only had eight years to fix this. But of course they had more important things to do than make our votes secure.

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"Ask Obama about his plan for the economy, you'll find he doesn't know what he's talking about, but the media doesn't write that about him -- they write it about Sarah Palin." Rush, the vulgar pigboy

But Rush, Obama has been doing interviews and answering questions daily for two years. Palin gave 3 interviews and did so bad they won't ler her speak again - to anybody.

You can pretend it's the same, Pigboy, but it's not.

McCain won't let Palin talk to the press because he knows she's not ready for the job. Since McCain thinks she's not ready for the job, why should we?

Look, John McCain isn't an epic failure just because I say so. He's an epic failure by objective standards. How can you possibly lose a debate worse than this?

In politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And by the end of the third and last presidential debate, the undecided voters who had gathered in Denver for Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg's focus group were "audibly snickering" at John McCain's grimaces, eye-bulging, and repeated references to "Joe the Plumber."

The group of 50 uncommitted voters should have at least been receptive to McCain—Republicans and Independents outnumbered Democrats in the group by almost 4 to 1, and they started the evening with much warmer responses to McCain than to his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. But by the time it was all over, so few of them had declared their support for McCain that there weren't enough for Greenberg to separate them into a post-debate focus group. Meanwhile, the Obama supporters had to assemble in two different rooms to keep their discussion groups manageable.

Barack Obama was openly laughing at John McCain last night. Undecided, but right-leaning, voters were laughing at John McCain last night. He was awful. Duncan nailed it, with this:

I admit to being quite puzzled by a lot of the instapunditry out there about the debate which seems to agree that at least in the first half McCain did ok. He was horrible. He looked awful and creepy and weird. I don't think he did all that well in any of the debates (missed most of the first one), but in this one he was truly abysmal.

John McCain was so bad in all three debates that it is kind of hard to choose which debate he lost the worst. Getting killed in a foreign policy debate was humiliating for Mr. Foreign Policy Experience. Getting creamed in a Town Hall Meeting debate was salt in the wounds for Mr. Debate Me in 300 Town Hall Debates. But last night was the worst debate performance I've ever seen, and I've watched way too many of these things.

Obama was cool, calm and collected. McCain was a simmering jerk.

Game over.

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Say it ain't so, Joe!

John McCain on Joe the plumber:

"I'm probably going to call him this morning. I thought he would probably be up late. I heard that his — that his phone lines were pretty well flooded. But I think we're going to be spending some time together."

Too bad John didn't know any of this when he chose to exploit Joe the plumber for political gain:

I don't know anything about Joe Wurzelbacher, but I just have one bit of advice. If you have anything in your past that you're not proud of — a messy divorce, a DUI, an unpaid bill, an indiscreet comment, whatever — be prepared for it to become public knowledge. The lefty blogosphere, along with allies in the press, will see to that.

Candy bar and porno chain 7-Eleven is of course holding an important election poll in which customers purchasing coffee have the option of using a blue cup if they support the Muslim or a red cup if they support Walnuts. Many more blue cups have sold! Why do 7-Eleven customers love terrorism so much?

Recently, the Bush/Reagan Supreme Court turned down Troy Davis' appeal for a new trial and did so without comment, as if they didn't need to explain why they're allowing an execution to go forward in a case where the evidence was so insubstantial as to be non-existant and 4/5 of the witnesses recanted, claiming they'd been pressured by police and coached by prosecutors eager for a conviction.

American Insurance Group executives have been ridiculed for spending $440,000 for entertaining themselves at a spa only days after receiving $85 billion in a public bailout. It appears that they have gotten the message. They went hunting partridges instead in England at a cost of $86,000. That is over three times the average income of the American citizens bailing them out for poor business decisions.Continue reading 'A Huntin' We Will Go: AIG Throws Itself a Hunting Party After the Public Bailout'

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In the aftermath of the final debate, and still flush with cash, Barack Obama is waging the final three weeks of the campaign not in swing states, but in red state territory. The Obama campaign is pinning McCain down in his own base states, forcing him to scrap his remaining swing state strategy in places like Wisconsin to focus on holding Bush's red state base from 2000 and 2004.

I'll bet he doesn't come here:

And in a related story:

"What happens tonight is that the momentum shifts. It goes from being all Obama to being all McCain. And you're going to see over the coming days a slow but sure increase in John McCain's standing and narrowing in the polls. They're going to be writing about John McCain comeback kid." Willard Romney on Fox News]

So ever since this election switched from practical bread-and-butter issues like how much Democrats are going to tax Jesus to fund their gay-married abortion babies to fluff like "the economy" and "the recession" and "the apocalyptic collapse of global capitalism" it looks like everybody's gonna vote for Barack Obama. Well good for you, see if Giblets cares, Giblets doesn't care about the stupid ol' presidency anyway. But before you go and throw your vote away just ask yourself: who is Barack Obama? " Giblets Barack Obama is the junior senator from Illinois who is running for president on some moderate health care and tax reform plans and a foreign policy which is actually very similar to John McCain's," you say because you are irritating and stupid and I hate you. Yes yes but who is Barack Obama, really? "Well he was born in Hawaii to Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr. and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and was a community organizer and a law professor before running for the Illinois state senate." Okay okay but who is Barack Obama, really, while I am playing scary music and flashing this terrifyingly desaturated image of Barack Obama in a turban across your television screen? "Oh my god I have no idea, who is this mysteriously radical mystery radical!" Giblets is glad you asked!

FACT! Barack Obama and sixties radical Bill Ayers were both associated with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a radical education foundation whose radical goal is to radically educate black children by educating them... while they are still black.

FACT! Barack Obama spent twenty years in the same church as radically black pastor Jeremiah Wright, who has been known to make such incendiary claims as "white people enslaved black people" and "white people killed Native Americans." Is Barack Obama part of the international black conspiracy to trick white people into thinking about racism? Answer: maybe.

Here's an interesting idea: since some countries have restrictive laws on abortion (rather like the ones McCain apparently would like to institute, where even the health of the mother becomes a non-excuse), a Dutch non-profit is sending a ship to provide reproductive health services to such countries, anchoring in international waters to get around local policies. It's a brilliant idea — a way to directly help women deprived of rational family planning opportunities by the wackaloons of their government.

Sarah Palin's office has discovered a renewable resource to bring millions of dollars into Alaska's economy: the governor's e-mails.

The office of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has quoted prices as high as $15 million for copies of state e-mails requested by news organizations and citizens. No matter what the price, most of the e-mails of Palin, her senior staff and other state employees won't be made public until at least several weeks after the Election.

You'll be glad to hear that while attendees at McCain/Palin rallies are hurling death threats at Barack Obama, the Secret Service is busy babysitting the media.

Yes. The Secret Service says it can't find the people in the crowd who keep calling for Barack Obama to be killed, and now we perhaps know why. Their agents are busy making sure that reporters don't leave their penned in areas and ask regular American citizens questions.

Now, how is it the Secret Service's job to play crowd control with reporters? Do they take sandwich orders too?

We know about this because Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank finally went public, and Huff Post caught it. Here's Milbank.

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What does it say about a country in which the most cogent political coverage is being done by stand-up and sketch comics and talk show hosts?

Hello. I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayres, whose organization bombed the U.S. capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at 202-863-8500.

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Europe mocks 'half-baked Alaskan'

For Europeans, who were alienated during George W. Bush's first four years by a president who showed little interest in their continent and patently cared nothing for the opinions of its leaders, the turning point probably came with the appearance on the Katie Couric show when Palin confessed to not having had a passport until 2006.

Europeans are appalled at the thought that someone who wants to be vice president of the most powerful nation on earth had so little interest in the rest of a world which is so vitally affected by the decisions of the man, or woman, in the White House.